I’m going to speculate here that Google Wave is going to make social media even more important in web site search engine rankings. Let’s assume Google implement Wave in more or less its current form. I see four SEO benefits for social media practitioners.

As you know, comments on your blog lead to traffic and in some cases back-links which pass PageRank. In other words, they help your Google ranking.

Sometimes people comment about my blog posts in Twitter or Facebook. Which is less useful from an SEO viewpoint than commenting directly on my blog. With Wave you’ll be able to re-direct comments made on your Facebook profile to your blog. You’ll probably be able to search for and drag in Twitter threads as well. So if you have a well developed social network and a web site you’ll see an increase in your comments. Where comments are relevant to what you’re writing about, all things equal, your search engine ranking should increase relative to people who don’t use those networks. That’s benefit #1: more commenting.

It’s also the case that the more often you post the more regularly you get indexed. Which leads to higher ranking.

Successfully implemented, (and I think that’s what’s going to happen) Wave will break down the barrier between email and web applications. Your emails will become more like threaded IM conversations and you’ll be able to suck them across to your web site as content. Conventional businesses will not allow instant publishing, but once again the social media junkies will ride the wild tiger. Their email/IM conversations and their conversations on social networking sites will become easily publishable content on their blogs. Benefit #2: more content.

The logical consequence of Wave technology is that social media networks will spawn web sites with multiple authors (multiblogs). In other words a new and very fast way of creating web content, which of course can link back to the site you’re promoting. Benefit #3: link-building.

The ‘federation’ aspect of Wave gives you the ability to aggregate contacts from your different social networks. This will lead to social network expansion and benefit #4: more followers.

If you’re a black hat SEO, you have already started working out how to manipulating Waves for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. If you’re a white hat, you’ve got six months to help your clients build the size and quality of their social networks.

I wrote an uninformed blog post after reading articles reviewing Google Wave. I’ve deleted it. Herewith, I hope, a more sensible post written after viewing the Google Wave video that was shown to developers. Although the articles I read were well written I got no sense of the likely paradigm shift until I saw the video.

The lessons are:

1. Video communication is much more powerful than a good review.
2. Watch the video if you want to understand this technology.
3. Bret is a schmuck.

So Wave is an exciting technology and it will profoundly affect web communication.

It’s a new communication platform that simply and elegantly integrates email, IM and applications. But there are four significant technology shifts in the way that it works.

The organisational concepts for Waves are intuitive. Lots of stuff just happens, lots of drag and drop and lots of search functionality.

Wave won’t be live until later in the year, but developers already have access to code and the APIs. So what’s it good for? It’s an improvement in collaborative work applications and has the capacity to seriously knock around Sharepoint. It is the first improvement on MS Outlook partly because it breaks down the barrier between email and web browser. And it looks like everyone’s desktop in 2010.

Just been reading Thom Kennon and find myself in complete agreement with him.

He talks about looking for info on Google’s recent changes to trademark policy. “I first searched in Google for ‘google trademark’ and came up with a mix of old or irrelevant algo results on page one, first timely results below the fold. So I turned to Twitter and searched ‘#google trademark’ and voila — nothing but timely results with a wealth of links back to rich, hot-off-the-presses and diverse content.”

This is exactly Twitter’s strength.

Twitter has become a real-time search engine populated with human-reviewed web links (as opposed to Google which uses non-human search indexing). For contemporary matters, Twitter often produces much better results than Google.

It amazes me that Biz Stone has publicly stated Twitter will not pursue an advertising model (eg. AdWords). That is the PROVEN BUSINESS MODEL you THICKHEAD! See all that screen real estate you’re not using on a Twitter page?? That’s what it’s for! To make you MONEY. Sheesh.

Although they were bright enough to buy the leading Twitter search engine (Summize), Twitter have completely missed the boat in the way they’ve integrating it on the home page. It’s a key feature but has been buried.

Google had better hope that no-one smart buys Twitter. Despite what you might read elsewhere, it’s Google’s only serious challenger.

Went to Sexpo and met Fiona Patten, the Convenor of the Australian Sex Party. I think this is going to be successful and influential. Set up by the Eros Foundation, the sex industry lobby group, it’s attracting the support of commercial operators within the sex industry. That means they’ll have a physical distribution channel through which they can promote membership. I gave Fiona my unsolicited opinion (people love that) – I think their strategic focus should be on gaining members. This is because the mainstream parties actually have very low membership numbers. If the Sex Party get to the point where membership numbers match either of the major parties, they will legitimise themselves in people’s minds. Nobody wants to vote for a party that nobody votes for.

Their web site is already attracting 35,000 uniques a week after just six months and they are more pro-social media than the rest. Okay that’s not difficult. Join the Facebook group here.

They also need to establish in people’s minds that what they’re chasing is some representation and balance in the Parliament. Not a take-over. They need to present themselves as reasonable and normal people and they probably should consider knocking off some of the hard edges on their policies, which are pretty strongly anti-religious. That won’t help.

I wish to point out that I’ve written about this without a double entendre which seems to be beyond most media folk.

Two products at Sexpo I thought were interesting. Sportsheets are a clever product. Restrain your partner using velcro pads that adhere to the sheets. So much easier than those infernal ropes.

Party High Pills is a new business selling herbal euphorics manufactured in Hamilton Hill (in a state of the art garage?) from ingredients sourced from New Zealand and Israel. Good quality presentation; they’ve done an excellent job. Although the danger levels are almost certainly lower compared with Ecstacy and amphetamines I think they’d be wise to amp up the reassurance on their web site about toxicity testing. I’m sure there’s a substantial market there so at some point, someone needs to fund a clinical trial. Meanwhile, will instigate individual sampling for purely research purposes.

The failure of Great Southern and their competitor Timbercorp will be mourned only by their investors and their greedy financial brokers. The Managed Investment Schemes (MIS) were a blight; an awful piece of government policy that fueled uneconomic plantings and helped tip the winegrape industry into chronic oversupply.

The artificiality of a scheme offering tax advantages unavailable elsewhere was always going to cause problems Everyone in the agriculture industry knows that a return on investment of 20%+ is extraordinary in these times. Yet MIS schemes were in the market projecting 25% plus for investors. Overlay substantial management fees, extravagant in some cases and ridiculous commissions for financial brokers; it just did not stack up. The Australian today covered the increases in executive salaries months before the collapse. I am so surprised.

Investors were either completely taken in or were 100% in it for the tax benefit. Why was the government in such a hurry to hasten plantings? They just distorted the economics of the agricultural industry and handed huge sums of money to rapacious and unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Who lobbied the government to implement these tax breaks? Now that these ill-conceived schemes have been exposed, there should be a parliamentary inquiry into how this all came about.

Pictured are John Young, who ‘earned’ a $2 million retirement bonus from the company last year, and Peter Mansell, a Great Southern non-executive director and former Chairman of West Australian Newspapers.

An excellent story from Radio National’s Law Report on the implications of the High Court judgment on Ice TV vs Nine Network. It was resolved in IceTV’s favour, to wit, no copyright exists in published TV programme guides. There’s a big knock-on effect.

The judgment says in part: (I was going to say ‘inter alia’. Would you have been impressed?)

There must be “creative spark” or exercise of “skill and judgment” before a work is sufficiently “original” for the subsistence of copyright.

My reading of this is that apart from television programme guides, telephone books (possibly even Yellow Pages), football fixtures and music charts based on sales numbers will also lose copyright protection. Of course, the owners of the “intellectual property” may challenge your attempts to commercialise what they see as theirs. However, it seems from the judgment that you’d win once you got to the High Court. You do have a legal budget don’t you?

In time, perhaps not very much time, third parties will re-purpose the White Pages and probably also the Yellow Pages as online databases.

White Pages (Telstra) and Yellow Pages (Sensis) limit the functionality of their online versions. They don’t let you output to text files that could be imported to spreadsheets or databases. Your queries output to a web page and you have to strip out what you’re interested in.

If a third party scanned all the Yellow Pages ads they could collect and publish the web addresses and contact details of all those businesses. At the moment businesses need to pay through the nose if they want click-throughs to their web site or email. Third parties could index all the copy in the Yellow Pages and allow searching by keyword. Take the restaurant category. You could search for street name, ‘B.Y.O.’, ‘alfresco’ or ‘gold plate’. This would immediately be more useful than Yellow Pages, which limits the search criteria to pre-determined fields. Doesn’t make any Sensis.

Third parties would introduce a White Pages reverse look-up, an ability to identify people who’ve moved house in the last twelve months (by comparing old and new books) and the sub-set of businesses big enough to take out bold and super-bold entries. They’ll be looking for opportunities to add value to the core information.

I think Sensis and White Pages still define themselves largely as books rather than databases. Yellow Pages revenue is under pressure. For Pete’s sake; it’s published once a year, it contains no product or price information and it offers a paltry number of low resolution pictures on crap-quality paper.

Now add in this decision, which may well open them up to even more online competition. The High Court has said data is just data. Information wants to be free.

- Further discussion of the legal implications: DLA Phillips Fox

- David Richards notes the lack of coverage of the judgment by Nine’s print media.

Perth, where I live, has a superb climate. Everyone who lives here knows it. To my mind, April is the most magnificent month of the year and this year, April weather has extended into May. Ridiculous amounts of mild/warm weather and blue skies.

It’s commonly held in marketing circles that the WA Tourism Association is not the sharpest axe on the block. If I were them, I would be talking up the climate of the place and encouraging the reporting of cloud statistics, which reflect well on our fair city. To help them out, I’ve constructed a prototype here (generous, I know). Cloud cover is normally measured in okta. Zero means cloudless, one means a trace of cloud, two means a clear day, six means a cloudy day and eight means complete cloud cover. I’ve constructed the Complementary Okta Scale which allows you to measure blue sky. 8/8 = solid blue sky. 0/8 = no blue sky. So here are the last 39 days:

The stats across the 39 days average out to a number that the Bureau of Meteorology define as a “clear” day. There were 4 days that individually would fit the category of a “cloudy” day. Not hard to cope with, since these days were all 25 degree-ish. You could always stay indoors.

To pick a completely random basis for comparison, here is the Melbourne data over the same period:

Here’s the Perth maximum temp over the last 38 days; maxima overwhelmingly between 25 and 30 degrees Celcius (77 and 86 Fahrenheit).

Minimum temps: between 10 and 16 degrees (50 and 59 Fahrenheit)

Wind averages 10.5 kph (6.5 mph). I think the official classification is ‘pleasant’. And relative humidity averages 46%, officially, ‘very bloody pleasant’. Okay, maybe not official.

Rain – only 5mm on the 14th April. We all took the day off.

Meetup.com is/was a 2002 startup which was all about using the Internet to create community meetings of people with shared interests. It gave you a message board, allowed members to RSVP and sent out reminders about meetings. Its legacy is that of the software used in Howard Dean’s successful social media campaign in 2004; the first successful use of social media in politics.

Today both the Adelaide and Brisbane Bloggers’ Meetups closed. Sydney and Melbourne limp on, with about 10 attendees at each meeting. We closed the Perth Bloggers’ Meetup over a year ago.

Writers and geeks are not known for their social proclivity. So all these groups struggle to attract party numbers anyway, but it highlights a bigger picture. I can’t find any Meetup groups in Perth that regularly have 10 people attend.

Despite a capital infusion from high-flying good-guy Pierre Omidyar, Meetup has had it. They started charging people (ie the organiser) for using the service in 2005. At that time, numbers were growing but they’ve flattened out at 5 million subscribers. They’re a victim of Facebook. Meetup comprises small special-interest groups and the $100 to $150 a year is a significant cost. Facebook provides all the core functionality of Meetup, has a wider installed base and is free.

At one point Meetup was valued at US$40 million, but its current income stream looks to me like less than $2 million per annum. There are 50+ employees (~$2 million in salary alone) and without a growth factor, it’s Goodnight Nurse.

Interestingly, they’ve recently switched to an employee-driven model, much like Linden Lab – Omidyar invested in that business too. In this structure, if that’s the right word, employees create their own projects rather than inheriting them from all-knowing managers.

On paper Meetup are dead in the water. If they can manage to survive, it should be seen as an endorsement of this (sorry; here it comes) new management paradigm.

Ad Age reports on Ford lending 100 new Ford Fiestas to especially selected bloggers in exchange for their independence and a share of their souls. 4000 applied but only 100 were young, good-looking, could string two sentences together and had the sycophancy gene. I’m being harsh; the dozen or so bloggers I checked out were interesting enough. A couple of B-grade celebs snuck in there but they’ve chosen people from diverse backgrounds, skewed towards creative types. The totality of the their output – Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and blogs is aggregated on the Fiesta Movement site.

It shows again the progressive credentials of large American companies. They leap into new media because they are hungry for first mover advantage and the publicity that results. The combination of new media and big business is newsworthy (don’t ask me why) and the Fiesta Movement will generate millions of dollars in PR.

I saw a Forrester report that said Japanese consumers were more engaged with social media than Americans but Japanese businesses were slower to develop social media applications than Americans. I’m guessing this is because their media are less willing to give free publicity just because business has discovered a new marketing tool.

Of course, the potential of this promotion is not just what the bloggers say about the Ford Fiesta on their blog but the effect that 100 different streams of writing/video blogging have on the web more broadly; the conversations about the conversations.

It’s risky for the brand because bad things can happen when you surrender control of the message to people who don’t have a stake in your brand. They might be just a little too honest, though from what I’ve seen so far, they’re all too excited to be critical.

But there is a risk too for the bloggers, whose readers may find the car references spurious and commercial. Could damage their franchise but I think 95/100 will finish well in front. In all, I believe this is the biggest and boldest social media experiment in the world today. My hunch is that it’s going to work extremely well. And if it does, the new media dollar has just been revalued.

Here’s Judson Laipply’s fairly compelling video application to be included in the 100:

The marketing term for this is a No-Brainer.

I know my business is called Free Beer but I should emphasize that I give it away responsibly. I’ve just done some work for Clubs WA who conduct training for people who serve alcohol. Part of that was a short intro to the course, compiled using the online tool Animoto.